Parenting Quotes - Page 9

Something must have happened, your mother speculated. In her mind a woman with no child could only be explained by vast untrammeled calamity. Maybe she just doesn't like children.Nobody likes children, Yunior, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.

If your kid needs a role model and you ain't it, you're both fucked.

The world's major religions: Same boss, different departments.

I am far from a perfect dad. And I always will be. But I’m a damn good dad, and my son will always feel bigger than anything life can throw at him. Why? Because I get it. I get the power a dad has in a child’s life, and in a child’s level of self-belief. I get that everything I ever do and ever say to my son will be absorbed, for good or for bad.

I don't think it really matters whether parents are strict or lenient, as long as they're consistent. Kids can live with more or less any set of rules so long as they know what they are. It's arbitrary tyranny that gets them mixed up.

Sex education in the modern manner has been well-described as plumbing for hedonists.

His son's transformation cannot be stopped, or hastened, or adjusted; the man he will become is already present, like a form emerging from a slab of stone. All that remains is to watch it happen.

As I’m beginning to find out, parenting is no child’s play, it couldSometimes determine whether couples continue to live together orgo their separate ways.

And whose fault was it that the boy swallowed down lies, when no one would feed him the truth?

Worrying about life’s circumstances of those I love, but over which I have no control is a dangerous, never-ending and pointless game to play.

Anybody out there who is a parent, if your kids want to paint their bedrooms,as a favor to me, let them do it. It'll be OK.

Allow yourself to think that the possibility of failure is a necessary part of parenting well.... Avoiding the possibility of failure means avoiding the possibility of being an extraordinary parent-and avoiding what you want for your child.

Just because a child doesn’t have both parents raising him or her, doesn’t mean that child becomes half the person they were meant to be. One wonderful parent can love enough for two, and love will always be the biggest influence in a child’s life.

It's easy to love kids who make you feel competent.

Parenting: Nobody really wants the job, but everybody thinks they can do better.

Men were often far different in their roles as fathers than they were as suitors, the memories of which kept them, out of necessity, both vigilant and violent, and even in tender moments, to their daughters.

Has there ever been a more important subject, in all the world, than children and families? These are, after all, the foundation and ultimate purpose of any society. Moreover, the overall purpose of this experience is not merely survival or just the day after day (after day) exercise of going through the motions of meeting basic needs. Rather, it was meant to be a long, deep immersion of a work in progress, a life-long celebration of sorts, steeped in love, beauty, and joy. Anything less is a travesty and is tragically off the mark of true success for the parent and the child, and amiss of the essentials for a fullness of life for both.

There is no single effort more radical in its potential for saving the world than a transformation of the way we raise our children.

We change our behavior when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of changing. Consequences give us the pain that motivates us to change.

Readers who have owned animals will appreciate how difficult it would be to train a dog to play exclusively in his own yard, to fetch his sweater whenever he sees it is raining outside, or to be generous in sharing his dog biscuits with other dogs. Yet these same people would not even question the feasibility of trying to use reward and punishment to teach their children the same behaviors.

The foundation for security and well being of a family is often built from a parent going extra miles to achieve it, doing mundane tasks to ensure it, standing up to injustice to protect it, and having the heart to listen and then express through embrace and action to each member of that sacred ohana how much they are deeply valued, unconditionally. And all the while, from birth, encouraging the other members to do the same. And often, from that foundation you have a home, well founded.

She had read enough about teenagers to understand you couldn't confront them directly. You couldn't even agree with them. The best strategy was to feign indifference to whatever wrong direction they were headed in, then plop in little facts, like Alka-Seltzers, round innocuous comments, let those sink in, take slow, antidotal effect . . .

If you want to love a parent you have to understand the incredible investment he or she has in you. If you are a parent, and you want to be loved, you have to deserve it.

Children need time to become themselves--through play and social interaction. If you overwhelm a child with stuff--with choices and pseudochoices--before they are ready, they will only know one emotional gesture: More!

If Mother had to be told not to shove the entire brick of Ivory up Junior's hindquarters, constipation is the least of his problems.

She had come to understand that American parenting was a juggling of anxieties, and that it came with having too much food: a sated belly gave Americans time to worry that their child might have a rare disease that they had just read about, made them think they had the right to protect their child from disappointment and want and failure. A sated belly gave Americans the luxury of praising themselves for being good parents, as if caring for one's child was the exception rather than the rule.

If the sound of happy children is grating on your ears, I don't think it's the children who need to be adjusted.

Why shall we talk?We talk to enrich our children’s vocabulary, and to let them use their vocabulary balance so their language grows, and their balance of words doubles along with their self confidence.

Love your kids and just be there for them. You don't have to eyeball their every moment or to orchestrate all their comings and goings. They know this. They know that's too much. All they want is to be assured that there's a home fire cooking, that there are two foremen and a rulebook, and that there's someone to tuck them in at night.

Childhood years are vital to our total existence. Overloading the child with too much memory oriented learning and formal writing can cripple a child’s sense of wonder. There should be creativity, a ‘Free Progress’ – each child developing and flowering in an absolutely spontaneous, inwardly centered and self directed process. A school makes a break through if it creates a learning environment but it is a parent to make an active choice for kids and to nurture their talents. It is in their hands to recognize their potentialities and offer them an Alternative Education, a commitment, hard work, responsibility, learning the basic skills of reading and writing at own pace with creativity and open minds in open surroundings in tune to environment, blooming naturally!

With a lump forming in his throat, he thoughtabout all the hopes and dreams that he had for his son. More thananything, he prayed his boy would not grow up to be a screw uplike his dad when it came to love and marriage.

I will hold my self to a standard of grace which is Christ's gift, not perfection which is Satan's trap.

We're constantly judging and grading other parents, just to make sure that they aren't any better than us. I'm as guilty as anyone. I see some lady hand her kid a Nintendo DS at the supermarket and I instantly downgrade that lady to Shitty Parent status. I feel pressure to live up to a parental ideal that no one probably has ever achieved. I feel pressure to raise a group of human beings that will help America kick the shit out of Finland and South Korea in the world math rankings. I feel pressure to shield my kids from the trillion pages of hentai donkey porn out there on the Internet. I feel pressure to make the insane amounts of money needed for a supposedly 'middle-class' upbringing for the kids, an upbringing that includes a house and college tuition and health care and so many other expenses that you have to be a multimillionaire to afford it. PRESSURE PRESSURE PRESSURE.

Sorting out what's good and bad is the province of ethics. It is also what keeps priests, pundits, and parents busy. Unfortunately, what keeps children and philosophers busy is asking the priests, pundits and parents, "Why?

Das mine!' protested Ava, Bennie's daughter, affirming Alex's recent theory that language acquisition involved a phase of speaking German. She snatched a plastic skillet away from his own daughter, Cara-Ann, who lurched after it, roaring, 'Mine pot! Mine pot!

If you can control your behavior when everything around you is out of control, you can model for your children a valuable lesson in patience and understanding...and snatch an opportunity to shape character.

His love for his children bore down on his heart with the weight of three heavy stones. There were all his unnamed fears for them, and hopes for them. There was all he was powerless to change, including who they were--one too mild, one too easily tempted to be cruel, and the little girl (it was the weight of a heavy stone against his heart) a mystery to him, impossible to say what she, through her life, would need. And soon, one more.

Much of life, fatherhood included, is the story of knowledge acquired too late: if only I’d known then what I know now, how much smarter, abler, stronger, I would have been. But nothing really prepares you for kids, for the swells of emotion that roll through your chest like the rumble of boulders tumbling downhill, nor for the all-enveloping labor of it, the sheer mulish endurance you need for the six or seven hundred discrete tasks that have to be done each and every day. Such a small person! Not much bigger than a loaf of bread at first, yet it takes so much to keep the whole enterprise going. Logistics, skills, materiel; the only way we really learn is by figuring it out as we go along, and even then it changes on us every day, so we’re always improvising, which is a fancy way of saying that we’re doing things we technically don’t know how to do.

This is not education my friend. It is a process of manufacturing computation devices that look like Homo sapiens, and thereby falsely labeled as Education.

Most children threaten at times to run away from home. This is the only thing that keeps some parents going.

Modern humans are taught from the childhood that they are weak and sinners. Teach them that they are embodiment of glory and children of immortal strength. Eventually a society full of bravehearts will rise.

Exactly what are you wanting to teach your children? -How to love and care for themselves, or how to neglect and abandon themselves? Self-sarifice is NOT setting a good example.

What a difference it makes to come home to a child!

Father had stretched out his long legs and was tilting back in his chair. Mother sat with her knees crossed, in blue slacks, smoking a Chesterfield. The dessert dishes were still on the table. My sisters were nowhere in evidence. It was a warm evening; the big dining-room windows gave onto blooming rhododendrons. Mother regarded me warmly. She gave me to understand that she was glad I had found what I had been looking for, but that she and father were happy to sit with their coffee, and would not be coming down. She did not say, but I understood at once, that they had their pursuits (coffee?) and I had mine. She did not say, but I began to understand then, that you do what you do out of your private passion for the thing itself. I had essentially been handed my own life. In subsequent years my parents would praise my drawings and poems, and supply me with books, art supplies, and sports equipment, and listen to my troubles and enthusiasms, and supervise my hours, and discuss and inform, but they would not get involved with my detective work, nor hear about my reading, nor inquire about my homework or term papers or exams, nor visit the salamanders I caught, nor listen to me play the piano, nor attend my field hockey games, nor fuss over my insect collection with me, or my poetry collection or stamp collection or rock collection. My days and nights were my own to plan and fill.

Howard adores Sam's looks. He loves the strong cut of jaw made satin with thickening peach fuzz, loses himself in the green eyes. Howard stares at them like a lover, but always obliquely. (Sometimes we watch our son from a distance. "I wonder what he's thinking," Howard will say.)

When you take the time to actually listen, with humility, to what people have to say, it's amazing what you can learn. Especially if the people who are doing the talking also happen to be children.

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

Oh, man, ‘the nursery,’ ” Dominic said, “what a hell-hole. If I had kids I’d give them the nicest room in the house.”“You do have kids,” his kid said.“Oh, yeah, well, right, you know what I mean.

You and Dad are really the wrecking ball of all of our teenage runaway fantasies. Why couldn't you jerks go and be crack addicts or religious fanatics so we could have excuses to live on the wide open road? - email from Lily

How can I help this son of mine see when I can't see? The parent must always self-parent first, self-preach before child-teach, because who can bring peace unless they've held their own peace?

We can best help our children not by sacrificing ourselves for them, but by trying to fulfill our own lives. When we are involved in an honest pursuit of our own goals, we serve as positive role models for our children.

I don't want my kids to be like me. I want them to be better than me.

We watch them grow, with sadness and amazement and fear. We have stepped away, but not entirely away. They know this. They sense it. We are no longer here, but we are not yet gone. And we will be like that for the rest of their lives.We watch, and they surprise us.We watch, and they surpass us.

Looking with his eyes? Seriously? What else would he look around with?”Trish nonchalantly uses her middle finger to scratch her temple. “Toddlers learn by making connections between the body part and the action.”Vince blinks. “Oh, so talking to a kid like that’s normal?” “Someday I hope to have a conversation where I don’t sound like a character from Star Wars.”“I can see how you’d look forward to that.

Education enables the humans to achieve their fullest mental and physical potential in both personal and social life.

Why shall we talk? To spread positive ambiance in the house, and to stimulate the hearty feelings, and to achieve a perceptible psychological connection between family members.

Your children will stop paying attention to you when they have reached your age of emotional maturity. If your child is starting to tune you out, you need to go through a growth spurt of emotional and spiritual maturity. You can never chase a child to a higher awareness; you can only lead them.

As a father, we need to actively listen.

He welcomes the chance to do fatherly things with the little girl, and those ten morning minutes with dear little four-year-old Ruby, with her deep soulful eyes, and the wondrous things she sees with them, and her deep soulful voice, and the precious though not entirely memorable things she says with it, and the smell of baby shampoo and breakfast cereal filling the car, that little shimmering capsule of time is like listening to cello music in the morning, or watching birds in a flutter of industry building a nest, it simply reminds you that even if God is dead, or never existed in the first place, there is, nevertheless, something tender at the center of creation, some meaning, some purpose and poetry.

I had uncovered a widely held but overlooked attachment: our attachment to the view that every problem must have a solution. We delude ourselves that we can think our way out of a problem or we see it as a matter of finding the right person to advise us. We become beggars for our problems, asking numerous people for an opinion. So often, we refuse to relax until a problem is fixed, only to discover our inability to relax was most of the problem.